What Keeps Culture Alive: 5 Daily Drivers That Make the Difference

Culture doesn’t live in your values deck or onboarding slides. It lives in what people see, hear, and do every day. In the choices leaders make. In the stories teams share. In the systems that either reinforce or undermine what you say you stand for. 

When the pace is fast and pressure is high, culture can drift quickly. But keeping it alive doesn’t require a full reset. It comes down to working the levers already around you, with intention.  

Here are five daily drivers that shape culture in motion and keep it alive when everything else is shifting. 

1. Leadership Behaviour & Communication 

Leadership is one of the most powerful forces shaping culture. Not through big statements, but in the way you lead meetings, give feedback, and respond to what’s working or what’s not. 

What you reward, what you ignore, what you communicate—these choices tell your team what truly matters. And most of the time, they’re not looking up the org chart for those cues. According to Gallup, 70% of culture is shaped by your immediate manager and peers. 

Your leadership style, especially under pressure, plays a critical role here. This post on how leadership shapes strategy and culture dives deeper into how tone, behaviour, and decision-making patterns reinforce (or erode) long-term impact. 

Ask yourself: What do my actions say we value here? 

Remember this: Leadership sets the tone. Micro-moves matter. 

2. Core Values and Rituals 

Values only matter if they show up in daily behaviour. And behaviour needs rhythm. 

Rituals make values visible. How you open your meetings, recognize contributions, or share stories. They bring consistency to what you care about.  

Example: A Friday “failure share” makes it clear that learning beats perfection. No slide deck could say it better. 

Done right, rituals build trust and clarity. They reduce ambiguity, create shared meaning, and make culture feel real especially in hybrid or fast-moving environments. 

Remember this: Rituals make values real. Repetition builds belief. 

3. Systems, Processes, and Structure 

Culture follows structure. If your workflows, incentives, or team design work against your values, they’ll win every time. 

Say you want more collaboration, but your organization rewards individual results. Or you want speed, but approvals take weeks. Misalignment like this doesn’t just slow things down. It breeds frustration. 

Remember this: If your systems don’t support your values, your culture won’t either. 

4. People: Hiring, Onboarding, and Managers 

People are both carriers and creators of culture. 

Every new hire influences the culture they walk into. So hire for alignment and curiosity not just skill. Then go further: onboard with intention, and involve your team in shaping the norms that matter. 

Culture isn’t downloaded. It’s co-created. 

Remember this: Don’t just hire for culture fit, hire for culture contribution. 

5. Metrics and Performance Climate 

What gets measured gets done. And what gets measured tells people what matters. 

If you only track outputs, you risk burnout. If you measure both how and what, you reinforce trust, sustainability, and alignment. 

Reflection, feedback, and learning aren’t soft. They’re cultural fuel. 

Remember this: What you measure becomes your message, choose it with care. 

🎧 Want to Go Deeper? 

We talk about this more in depth on Episode 9 of Momentum: Culture by Design or by Default. 

Bonny and Nora unpack what really shapes culture. Why it drifts, what keeps it alive, and how leaders can stay intentional as everything around them shifts. If one of these five drivers feels underused on your team, that’s not a failure, it’s a flag. Culture is always evolving. The key is knowing where to lean in.